The present invention relates generally to the field of data management, and more particularly to performing a merge operation.
A mathematically accurate closure is a group of files that reference elements in one another such that navigation can be achieved from any element in any document to any other element in any document. Additionally, a closure of files permits intra-closure inter-model navigation between any two nodes but have no further references or links to information in files outside of the closure. A logical model is comprised of many files that should be kept consistent across time. Therefore, changed files need to be synchronized in order to avoid data corruption.
In software engineering, multiple developers can each work on and make changes to the same set of data (e.g., a closure of models or other data, etc.) in parallel. A parallel development process leads to multiple concurrent data sets (e.g., releases, variants, etc.) that include updates to the original set of data. In order to maintain consistency in the parallel development cycle, the sets of data that have been modified by different developers should undergo merge operations periodically.